Thanksgiving Day 1991. I was living in Fallon, Nevada, a small town about an hour's drive east of Reno on U.S. Highway 50, known as The Loneliest Road in America. (I was stationed there in the Navy, so it wasn't my idea.) I had been living in a trailer on an old woman's guest ranch on the western outskirts of town since May of '89, at first with a roommate. But between one thing and another, he moved out after a year, leaving me to my own devices.
The Nevada high desert - so called because of the altitude - is a desert of alcalai, not sand. The climate is spectacular - the extremely dry air, the sky a great cupola of blue all year round, quite literally nothing in all directions for miles and miles. I was 33 and I was loving it, despite some personal - and professional - rough patches. The evenings were my element; the sunsets that seemed to go on for hours in the summer, the quiet disturbed only by the lowing cattle, an occasional coyote in the distance, the unobstructed desert wind that sometimes howled around my trailer, and the music I played on an old Victrola to which I jerry-rigged a cd player. And rum. Drinking for me was still at the fun stage.
I made no plans for Thanksgiving. I got no invitations that year to eat with someone else's family. My own family was in South Carolina - too far to go, I felt, for Thanksgiving dinner. So, sometime around 2 in the afternoon, I got in my car, a '76 Honda Civic, and drove into town, expecting to get a pizza. The map of Fallon in my memory is dotted with landmarks that are probably, in the real Fallon of 2018, no longer there or no longer recognizable. 27 years is a long time, even for a small town. I drove up a winding dirt road to Rice Road, turned left (west), left again on an access road, and finally reached the highway. I don't remember, but it was probably a cold day. (My AccuWeather app tells me that the weather in Fallon today is clear, in the 50s.) When I passed a Burger King, I noticed that it was closed. So was the Supermarket. Then I remembered how, on prior excursions on Thanksgiving Day when I was with my family, nothing was open. The first time, in Columbia, South Carolina, my parents announced that we were going to the NCO Club on Fort Jackson for dinner. We had done it before, but on Christmas Day, not on Thanksgiving Day. The NCO Club was closed. With nothing at home to eat, we began a pilgrimage across Columbia to find something - anything - to eat. At last we, the five of us, sat down to eat at the Marriott Hotel. My sister, Bibbit, made a scene when she sent her order back to the kitchen twice.
The second time my family made the mistake of trying to eat out on Thanksgiving, we were living in Denver. After driving all the way downtown looking in vain for somewhere to eat, we finally found a restaurant open for business - Josephina's in Larimer Square (now shuttered). The meal was expensive and delicious. (My sister wasn't with us on that occasion.)
Driving east on Lincoln Highway in Fallon that day was an equally desperate search. The pizza place was closed. So no pizza. I thought about a casino restaurant, but I wanted a take-home meal. Just when I thought I might go hungry on Thanksgiving Day, I found Szechuan Express was open. I also found that I wasn't alone in my search for something to eat that day. The place was packed. So, after standing in line for several minutes, I ordered enough for two people, collected my food, and drove home the same way I came.
Later, having consumed my crab rangoons and egg rolls, and started on my sesame chicken, I stepped out of my glass doors, sat down on the wooden steps, and looked out on my world - the view from my trailer that I'd gazed at for two and a half years. There was a broad pasture in front, surrounded by barbed wire. Beyond it some trees, with nothing else obstructing my view to the west. In four months I would be gone, bound for my next duty station, but those days and nights in the high desert, alone most of the time, took up a residence in my heart, and they remain there all these years later. It turned out to be a memorable Thanksgiving after all.
Robert Frost wrote about his own "Desert Places,"
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars - on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
Loneliness is what he's talking about - the loneliness of the natural world in which we have no proper place. But it didn't scare me then, looking out on an eventless horizon. And it doesn't scare me now.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Joseph Losey's film The Assassination of Trotsky (1972) opens with photographs of Leon Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Bronstein) from early childhood until 1932, when be was a "wandering exile." His wandering finally landed him in Mexico in 1937. Just as he was beginning to feel a sense of security (or the closest he could be expected to get to it) agents of Stalin, his great adversary, began to stir up resistance to his presence in Mexico. Communists outside Russia were divided along strict lines either in support of Stalin or against him, Stalinists vs. Trotskyists. As long as Trotsky was alive, his supporters felt, there was still hope for the revolution in Russia that he masterminded. For his enemies, only his death would complete the summation of the revolution in the person of Joseph Stalin.
Before the opening credits, a title appears: "Wherever facts are proven we have attempted to present them accurately. Those unproven we have left open." Which makes one wonder which facts, the proven or unproven kind, one is witnessing. They might as well have shown us a title that said THIS IS A MOVIE.
And before the opening credits are over, the voice of Richard Burton delivers what one assumes is a supertext: "In revolution there is no compulsion except that of circumstances. A revolution takes place only when there is no other way out." It is May Day, 1940 in Mexico City. In the parade that day, according to Isaac Deutscher's monumental three-volume biography of Trotsky, "20,000 uniformed communists marched through Mexico City with the slogan 'Out with Trotsky' on their banners." We have already met the characters Jacson and Sylvia Ageloff (Alain Delon and Romy Schneider), alone in a room. We see them moments later in the street as the parade passes by, Ageloff shouting "Viva Trotsky!" and Jacson conspicuously trying to look inconspicuous.
Isaac Deutscher writes of Trotsky's old friends, Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer, who had come to stay at his home in Coyoacan, Mexico in October 1939. But among these "welcome guests, the Rosmers, an ominous shadow was to creep in, the shadow of Ramón Mercader--'Jacson'. This was the 'friend' of Sylvia Agelof, the American Trotskyist who had attended the foundation conference of the Fourth International at the Rosmers' home ... 'Jacson' posed, plausibly enough, as a non-politically minded businessman, sportsman, and bon viveur; it was supposedly as an agent of an oil company that he went to Mexico City at the time when the Rosmers arrived there. He kept himself in the background, however, and for many months sought no access to the fortified house at the Avenida Viena [Trotsky's home]. But he was getting ready for his dreadful assignment."(1)
Jacson was an agent of Stalin's NKVD. A Spaniard recruited during the Spanish Civil War by Soviet agents, he acquired the stolen passport of a Canadian named Frank Jackson (misspelled 'Jacson' on the passport by the Russians) who had died fighting in the International Brigade in Spain. With it he travelled to the U.S. where he befriended Sylvia Ageloff, a New York radical and Trotsky sympathiser. He then moved to Mexico City and asked Ageloff to join him there. Their relationship in the film is exclusively erotic. In the film, he ingratiates himself with one of Trotsky's bodyguards. He expresses to Ageloff his desire to meet Trotsky, but she wonders what they could possibly have in common.
Mercader was not just another loser like Lee Harvey Oswald whose life suddenly found a meaning and purpose in the murder of a world figure. In fact, Mercader was everything Oswald wanted to be. Sentenced to 20 years in a Mexican prison for killing Trotsky, his mother Caridad, also involved in the assassination plot, was awarded the Order of Lenin by Stalin. Upon his release from prison in 1960, Mercader travelled from Mexico City to the fledgling socialist state of Cuba, and from thence to the USSR, where he was given a hero's welcome and personally awarded Hero of the Soviet Union by the head of the KGB. He is buried in Moscow.
Losey follows the historical narrative closely, but he leaves little room for his characters to express themselves in anything other than historical terms. Trotsky himself, as performed by Richard Burton, speaks in slogans. Perhaps Trotsky was like that - a walking, talking professor of revolution. It's impossible not to see him as a political prisoner everywhere he goes. Everyone around him is either a Trotskyist or a more or less clandestine agent of Stalin. It's difficult to quite understand the degree to which Stalin's agents were everywhere. Trotsky's physical courage, once he realized what he was up against, had to be astonishing. At one point, Natalya (he calls her Natasha in the film) speaks Trotsky's epigram about Judas: "Of Christ's twelve Apostles Judas alone proved to be traitor. But if he had acquired power, he would have represented the other eleven Apostles as traitors."
As a dramatization of historical events that are more or less ironed out by the time the film was made, 30 years later, The Assassination of Trotsky acquits itself rather well. It even muddies some of the details that the Mexican authorities fudged in their investigation so that conclusions that might be drawn by the viewer become a trifle perilous. The facts remain clear today, nearly 50 years after the film was made. Leon Trotsky, the brains behind the 1917 Bolzhevik Revolution, came into direct opposition to Joseph Stalin upon the death of Lenin. Even with Trotsky out of Russia for good, Stalin knew that the great polemicist of revolution would remain a threat to his hold on communists abroad. After he had completed his biography of Lenin, Trotsky was at work on a biography of Stalin when the assassin struck.
If all this seems painfully academic by now, The Assassination of Trotsky does nothing to make us care about any of the principal figures in the story, except perhaps Natalya, Trotsky's extremely long-suffering wife, gracefully if thanklessly played by Valentina Cortese. Richard Burton is charismatic as always but wasted in a role that never seems to breathe on his own, unassisted by the historical bulwark. Alain Delon is wasted, too, in the part of the silent assassin, who occupies himself looking for an opportunity to strike. It was five years since Delon played the far different, inhumanly cool hired killer, Jef Costello, in Melville's Le Samouraï. Romy Schneider does her best in the role of a neurotic American socialite-turned-revolutionary. The sound recording is a godawful mess, with much post-dubbing due to all the heavy (mostly French) accents, and even a few strange voice-overs that would seem to be Trotsky's and Jacson's thoughts. When Jacson finally attacks him, Trotsky's scream is terrifying. But within seconds, as he Jacson being beaten nearly to death by Trotsky's bodyguards, it is hard to distinguish his screams from Trotsky's. (Perhaps that was Losey's point, but it's hard to tell.)
Nicholas Mosley wrote the non-fiction book on which the film was ostensibly based and he wrote the screenplay. He had also written the novel Accident that Losey had turned into a creditable film in 1966 (with a script by Harold Pinter). Mosley, who died just last year, was, of course, the son of Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists and one of the most reviled Britons of the 20th century. How intriguing that his son was drawn to telling the story of one of history's greatest revolutionaries. Joseph Losey's involvement in the project made better sense. In 1946, Losey had joined the Communist Party. He didn't know it at the time, but he and his wife, the actress Elizabeth Hawes, were already under FBI investigation. In fact, the FBI suspected that Losey had become an agent of Joseph Stalin in 1945! Eventually, Losey was brought to the attention of the dreaded House of Un-American Activities Committee and was blacklisted. He went to Europe to work in films, first under an assumed name, since some actors didn't want their names associated with a named communist. He managed to emerge from intentional obscurity with the superior sci-fi The Damned (1960), but it was The Servant (1963), also scripted by Harold Pinter, that brought Losey international attention.
Shot on location in Mexico (by the excellent Pasqualino De Santis), with period production design by Richard Macdonald, and a brooding, mostly electronic musical score by Egisto Macchi, the film seems to keep itself aloof from events that it is helpless to prevent. There is not even a sense of the terrible waste of it all, even when the film itself is a waste. The insertion of a horrifically botched bullfight (followed by the butchering of the bull) is gratuitous rather than symbolic. The torero failed to kill the bull outright with his sword - get it? Just as Jacson failed to kill Trotsky outright with the ice axe. The moment he delivers the blow, Jacson closes his eyes - only to see an enraged Trotsky getting up to fight him when he opens them.
How did the makers of this film (including its producer) think audiences would respond to the careful reconstruction of events surrounding the death of one of the principal architects of the Russian Revolution? Trotskyism did not die, as Stalin perhaps hoped, with Trotsky. Trotsky emphatically believed, as did many socialists, that the end of the war would bring about the last great cycle of the revolution. The story of Trotsky's murder has a tragic dimension that the film doesn't even hint at. Some critics have commented on the total lack of suspense in what could be mistaken for a suspense thriller. But the way the film is laid out deliberately mitigates whatever suspense or thrills it might have had. Because it's history, we already know everything. Why should we care for anyone in the drama? The film fails to give us an answer because it doesn't convince us that Trotsky was anything more than the loser in a power struggle involving millions of people we never knew. Jacson is presented to us as nothing but a sinister creep whose sole function in life was to carry out Trotsky's execution. Whatever built-in pathos the killing of the old Bolzhevik may have for people who still give a damn for the socialist cause (and I am one of them) is completely missing.
The film doesn't tell us that Trotsky was cremated and his ashes buried beneath a white stone within the compound of his house in Coyoacan and that his wife lived there another twenty years, according to Isaac Deutscher, "and every morning, as she rose, her eyes turned to the white stone in the courtyard."
With the exception of Mr. Klein, I was never all that impressed by Losey's work. To his enduring credit, however, he told an interviewer in 1983 that being forced to give up a career in Hollywood had saved him: "Without it I would have three Cadillacs, two swimming pools and millions of dollars, and I'd be dead. It was terrifying, it was disgusting, but you can get trapped by money and complacency. A good shaking up never did anyone any harm."
(1) Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929-1940 (London: Verso, 2003).
With Thanksgiving just a few days away, it may seem like an inopportune occasion to express my ingratitude to all those people, most of whom don't know me, who found it necessary on Veterans Day to thank me for my service. But I cannot escape the feeling that circumstances are conspiring, even as I write this, against me. And that I may not have much more time to put down my true feelings on this most sensitive, for a disabled veteran serviceman, of subjects. But here goes.
When I first joined the Navy in May 1988, Ronald Reagan was president and we were on course to achieving a 600-ship fleet. The Navy had three recruit training centers, in Great Lakes, Illinois, San Diego, and Orlando, Florida, which is where I did my basic training.
That was thirty years ago, and a great deal has changed since then. For one thing, there is no longer a Soviet Union to oppose us, making such an enormous military obsolete. Two of the RTCs have long since closed. Even Desert Storm, which inspired so much pride in the military in 1990, ended with a resounding fart, and hundreds of thousands of servicemen who were considered vitally necessary just months before were handed their pink slips. It was called downsizing, but it was more like a fire sale. Recruiting quotas dropped to almost nothing for awhile.
Then 9/11 happened, and people were volunteering in droves again - principally to give them a license to go off and kill Arabs. And boy did we ever. Even conservative estimates counted more than 100,000 Iraqis killed after the 2003 invasion, but later studies count as many as a half million. We didn't kill them all (they were killing one another long before we showed up), but the invasion accelerated the rate of killings. 4,804 Americans and coalition forces were also killed.
Currently 0.4 % of Americans are serving in the military, but 7.3 percent of all living Americans have served in the military at some point in their lives (thank you FiveThirtyEight). Our last four presidents didn't serve in the military. Three of them dodged the draft to avoid service in Vietnam. Fewer people see the need to serve. Some are open about it. I was interviewed for a job in 2007 in which the young man interviewing me, upon learning of my 11 ½ years of service, told me to my face that he didn't see the point of serving one's country. Since I needed the job, I didn't put the stupid punk in his place.
I have been living in self-inflicted exile in the Philippines on a 30 % Veterans Disability rating for more than a decade. That's currently less than $500 a month. For awhile it was less than $400. Myself and a woman and her children. I never meant this to happen, but that it did has been an enduring miracle. That miracle has been brought down to earth. I was informed in August that I was being audited. Then I was informed that, since 2003, I was overpaid $37 a month the first year all the way up to $49 a month this year. Not a staggering amount, but it adds up to my owing the U.S. government more than $7,000. (My first thought was: this is how our president is trying to pay for his Big Tax Cut, by going after defenseless veterans like me.) How do I repay it? I wrote and sent them a letter explaining my total dependence on my monthly benefits check - not to persuade them to defer my debt, but to convince them that deducting a major part of it would precipitate the end of my life here among the tinkling palms. And by "the end" I don't mean a get-out-of-jail-free card.
So now, whenever I hear the phrase "Thank you for your service" I sometimes detect sincerity behind it. It includes thanks for the sacrifice - for not just fighting America's wars, but standing sentry duty all over the globe so that they could sleep safe and sound. And to them my response is a warm "You're welcome." Anytime. My pleasure. But most of the time what I hear in those words is someone who feels obliged to say it, that in saying it they are fulfilling some duty of their own. What I actually hear, behind the practiced, clichéd phrase, is "Thank you for relieving me of the duty of serving my country." And to that funny kind of gratitude I have to respond with "No thanks."
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.
-Laurence Binyon, "For the Fallen," Fourth Stanza, 1914
The publicity surrounding the BBC broadcast of Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old last Sunday has been rather unprecedented and unusually emotional for a documentary, more specifically a film made up of century-old documentary footage. Finished in time for the centenary of the end of the Great War on November 11, critics have expressed an overwhelming awe of Jackson's film, which was a "labor of love" that took him four years to complete.
In his review of the film, Peter Bradshaw of The Manchester Guardian writes: "The effect is electrifying. The soldiers are returned to an eerie, hyperreal kind of life in front of our eyes, like ghosts or figures summoned up in a seance. The faces are unforgettable." Over at The Observer Mark Kermode writes, "As we watch a line of soldiers marching through mud towards the front, something extraordinary happens. The film seems almost miraculously to change from silent black-and-white footage to colour film with sound, as though 100 years of film history had been suddenly telescoped into a single moment. Stepping through the looking glass, we find ourselves right there in the trenches, surrounded by young men whose faces are as close and clear as those of people we would pass in the street. I’ve often argued that cinema is a time machine, but rarely has that seemed so true."
Kermode reminds me of a wonderful moment in Le fantôme d'Henri Langlois in which Langlois is standing before a screen on which is projected a film made in 1895, and he says, "My goal was to show shadows of the living coexisting with shadows of the dead. For that's the essence of film. It supercedes time and space. It goes beyond the 4th dimension. Here we see Seville in a fragment of a re-framed Lumière film. It's a procession there in 1895. But that's not what counts. What matters is that these people are like us and as they walk, we walk along. So the audience is right there with them."
I'm not sure what Langlois, who collected 50,000 films for his Cinemathèque Française, would've thought about Peter Jackson's tampering with the sacred shadows of the dead. For tampering is what it is. I have a problem with revisionists. When, in 1952, the Revised Standard Version of the Bible was published, which sought not only to correct mistakes made in the 1611 King James Version, but to produce a text "written in language direct and clear and meaningful to people today,” a Bible as close as possible to “the life and language of the common man in our day,” the result provoked Dwight Macdonald to ask,
And why this itch for modernizing anyway? Why is it not a good thing to have variety in our language, to have a work whose old-fashioned phrases exist in the living language, to preserve in one area of modern life the old forms of speech, so much more imaginative and moving than our own nervous, pragmatic style? As it enriches us to leave beautiful old buildings standing when they are no longer functional or to perform Shakespeare without watering his poetry down into prose, so with the Bible. The noblest ancient fane must be trussed and propped and renovated now and then, but why do it in the slashing style of the notorious Gothic “restorations” of Viollet-le-Duc? In any event, I think the Revisers exaggerate the difficulty of K.J.V. Almost all of it is perfectly understandable to anyone who will give a little thought and effort to it, plus some of that overvalued modern commodity, time. Those who won’t can hardly claim a serious interest in the Bible as either literature or religion.
Ask Kevin Brownlow, who has devoted most of his life to finding very old - sometimes "lost" - films and restoring them to something close to their original glory, ask him if it's OK to remove these old black-and-white silent films from their context, from their place not in history but as history, and resuscitating them from dead black-and-white to living color. And adding not just actor's voices seamlessly lip-synced to the people in the films, but all of the ambient sounds that couldn't be recorded in 1914-1918. Then there's the creation of additional frames to eliminate the accelerated, jerky motion caused by cameras hand-cranked at anywhere from 16 to 26 frames per second, so that people not only look and sound as good as new, but they move normally, at the standard 24 frames per second. And all this just to make the films more “accessible” to the modern viewer, who probably has never had patience enough to watch an old "grey" movie made before his lifetime - any time prior to 1990, that is.
In the November 14 BBC article, "Viewers were floored by the colour added to WW1 footage in They Shall Not Grow Old," Declan Cashin writes,
Adding colour to black and white historical images has its own kind of intense
emotional power - mostly because it can make an event that seems so far in the
past become instantly more recent and relevant. Think of the work of artist Marina Amaral, whose painstaking colouring of a picture of a young Holocaust victim went viral earlier this year.
“It is much easier to relate to people once we see them in colour," Amaral said of her project. The colourisation of World War One in They Shall Not Grow Old - and the effect of seeing so many young men brought to life in vivid hues - provoked a similarly big reaction from viewers.
The article includes a reproduction of the image mentioned above (someone attached it to a tweet!). It does indeed have an almost supernatural power. But am I alone in finding this digital fixing up of the past, especially the image (a "registration" photo taken by the Germans) of a helpless victim of the Holocaust, disturbing? Is that poor little girl more "alive" merely because a computer has colorized the obvious look of terror on her face? I thought about reproducing it here, but thought better of it. I'd rather not participate in the trivialization of tragedy. I feel sorry for a generation that cannot make the human connection with people now dead because photographs of them have heretofore been black-and-white.
It is true that the technology of the motion picture has gone through several developments - what some people might call "improvements", the most important of which are the transition from silent film to film with synchronized sound, and the much slower transition from black-and-white film to various color processes like Technicolor and Eastmancolor. But as technology was advancing, artists were doing what they always have done by making a virtue out of necessity and developing an aesthetics of film with or without sound and color. Just as black-and-white photography is distinguished by much more than simply the absence of color, a silent film is a great deal more than simply a film deprived the dimension of synchronized sound. Great films were made during the silent era, and their greatness is separable from anything like historical or cultural importance. Charlie Chaplin's Tramp was not deprived of the power of speech. In every one of his silent films he talks like everyone else. We simply couldn't hear his voice until the end of Modern Times when he sings a nonsense song. But the essence of Chaplin's art was silence. Later film clowns like Tati and Étaix used the pretense of silence, as an homage, perhaps, to Chaplin and Keaton. But it isolated them from the world in their films, in which everyone else spoke in voices we could hear. Chaplin's and Keaton's world was silent, but they were substantial parts of that world.
I can't escape the feeling that Jackson's film, however scrupulously well-intended, is in the service of the same philistinism that led Ted Turner to colorize classic American films, misguided tamperings, trying to put old wine into new skins, that were universally condemned at the time. Jackson's palette of colors is far more presentable - not as "tutti frutti" - as Turner's, but they are equally deplorable. The people who were "floored" by the images in Jackson's film should examine their emotional reactions more closely and ask themselves why they were so unmoved by the images when they were black-and-white.
If filmgoers today can't sit through a feature length silent film, it's only because they're not up to the level of concentration that a film like Abel Gance's Napoleon or Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin requires of them. It's the difference between the poetry of silent film that relies exclusively on images and the prose of contemporary film that is closer to nature, with all of the colors and sounds of nature that is ubiquitous today. Knowledge of the technical limitations of films housed in the Imperial War Museum, not to mention a generation of people captured in those films whose lives and understanding of the world and of history have set them far apart from us and from our time, requires an adjustment from the viewer that is tantamount to an act of the imagination. The direct connection between now and then, us and them, has long since been broken. Like a break in an electrical connection, an increase in the current can cause the electricity to "jump" or arc across the broken connection, and an act of concentrated imagination can re-establish contact with the past.
The title of Jackson's film, which is a line from the Laurence Binyon poem written on the occasion of the first great battles, and first great losses, of the war for the British Expeditionary Force, the battles of Mons and of the Marne, is beautiful but it is also double-edged. They shall not grow old ... because they were all killed when they were young. We grow old, which is one of the prices of being alive. Being revisited by them in Jackson's film may bring them closer to us as human beings, but it's a disservice, I think, to them as individuals, even when every face is given a name.
I was reminded of John Donne's famous Ode, "Death Be Not Proud," which assures us that death's victory is, at best, only temporary, since, in killing us, Death sends us to our immortal afterlife.
why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
Written in 1609, but published posthumously in 1633, Donne was a member of that last generation of English poets, like Herrick, who, according to George Saintsbury, "have relished this life heartily, while heartily believing in another." But who believes in personal immortality any more? Only religious hysterics, perhaps, whose faith is not impaired by knowledge when knowledge is thoroughly lacking. A better view is presented by Drummond Allison (1921-1943), a British war poet (of the Second World War), in "Come, Let Us Pity Not the Dead But Death":
Come, let us pity not the dead but Death
For He can only come when we are leaving,
He cannot stay for tea or share our sherry.
He makes the old man vomit on the hearthrug
But never knew his heart before it failed him.
He shoves the shopgirl under the curt lorry
But could not watch her body undivided.
Swerving the cannon-shell to smash the airman
He had no time to hear my brother laughing.
He sees us when, a boring day bent double,
We take the breaking-point for new beginning
Prepared for dreamless sleep or dreams or waking
For breakfast but now sleep past denying.
He has no life, no exercise but cutting;
While we can hope a houri, fear a phantom.
Look forward to No Thoughts. For Him no dying
Nor any jolt to colour His drab action,
Only the plop of heads into the basket,
Only the bags of breath, the dried-up bleeding.
We, who can build and change our clothes and moulder,
Come, let us pity Death but not the dead.
Alas, Drummond himself was a casualty of war. Unlike him, Death cannot live on through poetry.
In August 1918, pioneering French filmmaker Abel Gance was drafted into the French Army's Service Cinématographique. He had been rejected when war broke out for health reasons, due to a bout of tuberculosis before the war. A filmmaker since 1912, watching as, year after terrible year, beloved friends were killed in the trenches (the French army suffered more than a million killed or missing in action), Gance was anxious to express his hatred of war in a film. Charles Pathé agreed to finance the film that would eventually be released more than four months after the end of the war (on this day, one hundred years ago), as J'Accuse.
"J'Accuse" (I accuse) are the first words spoken by the prosecutor in every French court case, and Gance assumed a staunch prosecutorial stance in his indictment of war. Initially, his film tells the story of a standard love triangle involving François Laurin, a poet named Jean Diaz, and Édith, the daughter Maria Lazare, a veteran "soldier of 1870" in a Provençal village. The film opens with a village festival, and Édith is gazing through a window at Jean. But Jean's mother warns him that Édith is married. François, her husband, is introduced with a dead deer lying on a table beside him as he laughs and drinks, the deer's blood collecting in a pool on the floor. He tries to force his dog to drink it. Then he notices Édith looking out of the window at Jean. The arrival of Édith's father prevents François from becoming violent. But Maria Lazare is consumed by memories of military glory, with his Legion d'honneur on the wall with his military regalia, and a map of Alsace-Lorraine on the opposite wall. François broods alone, the dead deer at his feet, as the revellers dance in the street beyond.
At home with his mother, Jean writes and then recites to her his "Ode to the Sun," and instead of the words, Gance gives us ecstatic images of the beauty of the sun-lit world - a visual poem evoking Jean's words. Finally, the ghostly figure of Édith haunts these images. The earthly Édith, however, must endure the leering attentions of François. François is all body In contrast to Jean's all soul.
When the war is declared on August 2, 1914, the men cheer, the women weep. A little girl runs to announce to her friends, "C'est la guerre!" A little boy asks her, "what is 'war'?" "I don't know," she answers. As the bells ring out, Gance cuts to a dance of death - skeletons dancing around a central figure of death. Every young man in the placid town enlists, including François. (They were also enlisting in similar numbers in England, Germany, Austria and Italy, oblivious of the prolonged disaster all of them would experience.) Only Jean, preoccupied by his sunlit poetry of "Pacifiques," resists the call to arms. Finding a love letter from Jean to Édith, François threatens to shoot him if she doesn't leave the town and go to live with his parents in Lorraine. With Édith gone from the village, Jean looks at photographs of war's destruction, of houses reduced to rubble, and of dead soldiers lying in a trench. The word J'ACCUSE appears above Jean's head as he looks directly into the camera.
With François at the front, Maria Lazare and his old cronies plot out on a map the reported movements of the war. When he receives word that his daughter has been captured by the advancing German army, he collapses. Word spreads in the village, and Jean, swearing vengeance on Édith's captors to her father, decides to enlist.
Meanwhile, at the front, when François receives a letter informing him of Édith's fate, in a rage he charges the German line alone and takes an entire squad of them captive. Gance manages to capture, in just a few shots, the squalor and dangers faced by French soldiers, as well as their proximity to the enemy.
As Fate (and Abel Gance) will have it, Jean's first command, upon his commission as lieutenant, is François's unit. Their initial antagonism toward each other is changed to comradeship when Jean completes a dangerous mission that he was ordered to delegate to François. And they realize how much they both love Édith. As battles rage around them, they swap stories of her. (In one startling shot, a soldier falls and his muddy boots alight on François's shoulder, but François ignores them as he and Jean reminisce about Édith.) A title presents a quote from a "lettre d'un soldat": Sache qu'il y aura toujours de la beauté sur terre et que l'homme n'aura jamais assez de méchanceté pour la Supprimer. [Know that there will always beauty on earth and that man will never have enough malice to suppress it.] An optimistic wish that Gance follows with the Botticelli triptych "La Primavera", but the dancing skeletons appear again and, like the nursery rhyme, they all fall down. So ends the "Première Époch" of J'Accuse.
Although there were film units sent to document the war on both sides of the conflict, there exists very little film evidence of the actual conditions at the front and, understandably, no footage depicting actual battles except from a great distance. The reason for this scarcity of a documentary record of life in the trenches is simple: the authorities did not want to disturb civilian morale by showing them the terrible conditions being endured by the common soldier. The stories that the soldiers were taking home with them when they went on leave from the front were probably difficult for civilians to fully grasp. So censors were careful not to allow newsreel cameramen to get too close to the front or be too explicit with their images of actual warfare. This deliberate censorship would also be used in the next war, even when civilians were directly targeted by military attacks. It wasn't until Vietnam that American television networks felt some civic duty in showing the true horrors of the war to the public, but only because the war was so unpopular and, ultimately, deemed unwinnable. Perhaps the Great War wouldn't have lasted as long as it did if civilians had been shown the truth about the fighting in the trenches.
Four years pass. Jean has taken ill at the front and François receives a letter informing Jean that his mother is confined to her bed and he must return home at once. Jean arrives by train in his village, and Gance gives us a marvelous tracking shot, following Jean as he strolls uneasily toward home. He pauses to take in a view of his beloved village. When he arrives at his mother's bedside, she asks him to recite to her his "Ode to the Sun." But while he ecstatically recites the words and Gance repeats the same images from the earlier scene to evoke Jean's words, his mother dies.
Maria Lazare receives a letter from none other than Édith announcing her return that very night. When he goes to Jean's mother's house in the rain to tell her the news, he finds Jean there and they embrace. Édith arrives, soaked by the rain, but before the men can react to her return, she opens her cloak to reveal a small child. She recounts how, when she was captured in Lorraine, she was raped by the German soldiers. Gance shows us Édith, cowering in fear as the shadows of spike-helmeted Germans on the wall advance toward her. It is a measure, I think, of the change in anti-German sentiment in 1918 that Gance refrained from showing us anything more of Édith's rape. Such scenes were common in American films of the period. Erich von Stroheim made his name playing leering, murderous "Huns," raping a nun and tossing a baby out of a window when its cries interrupt his tearing the woman's clothes off. But Gance was being only slightly more subtle.
Édith's father telegrams François the news of Édith's return, without mentioning the child. There is a celebration among the soldiers at the front, an almost frantic scene of dancing and drinking, as bombs continue to fly. François returns home and his discovery leads him to suspect that she (Angèle) is Jean's child. François and Jean fight, almost to the death, but Édith stops them with the truth. Gance repeats the shots of Édith cowering beneath the shadows of three German soldiers. The Deuxième Époch ends with François and Jean donning their uniforms - girding their loins - again for war, swearing revenge on the German race.
The last section of J'Accuse reveals Gance's ambitions - and his weaknesses - at their extremes. At the front, awaiting the last battle, Jean rouses his fellow soldiers with a tale similar to Arthur Machen's "Angel of Mons" in which a "Gaulois" (the mythical Gaul, not the cigarette), leads the victorious soldiers into No Man's Land. Back home, little Angèle is teased by the children of the village for her German heritage, made to wear a spiked helmet (which she throws into the fire). And Édith is shown to be the symbol of French womanhood, replete with the painfully obvious pose of Christ on the cross.
The soldiers are shown drafting their last letters to their loved ones. Gance quoted in the titles from actual letters from the front, and he employed as many as 5,000 soldiers who had come home to the Midi on leave. It is at this point in the film that Gance made his boldest move. By mixing staged scenes of his actors with shots he and his cameramen took of the actual battle of Saint-Mihiel (Saint Mihel in the titles), September 12-15, 1918, he juggled fact and fiction cleverly, without fully examining its moral implications. So scenes of men actually fighting and dying were used by Gance as a mere backdrop for his "epic" battle. Gance, who had seen war and its effects with his own eyes, knew that if it was to be presented truthfully, it could only be shown as a horrific chaos. There is an unfortunate shot, from Jean's perspective, invalided to the rear because of a head injury, in which the dancing skeletons are superimposed on images of soldiers charging in all directions. This could be taken as Jean's ravings or as Gance's heavy hand.
The battle over (Saint-Mihiel was only a partial victory), with François dying and Jean half mad, François, true to form, bids his "good old dog farewell". He hands over Jean's letters to Édith to the doctor, grips Jean's hand (in the next hospital bed) and dies.
Édith and Angèle are at home together, when Jean enters suddenly, his clothes dirty and tattered. He is fearful of something outside the door. He has sent letters to all the townsfolk telling them to come to his house at 10 o'clock that night because there is something important that they must know. When they arrive and gather around him in the firelight, Jean tells them the following story, accompanied by stark, nightmarish images:
I was on sentry duty on the battlefield. All your dead were there, all your cherished dead. Then a miracle happened: a soldier near me slowly rose to his feet under the moon. I started to run, terrified, but suddenly the dead man spoke. I heard him say, 'Comrades, we must know if we have been of any use! Let us go and judge whether the people are worthy of us, and our sacrifice! Rise up, all of you!' And the dead obeyed. I ran in front of them to forewarn you. They're on the march! They're coming! They will be here soon and you will have to answer for yourselves! They will return to their resting places with joy if their sacrifice has been to some purpose.
To the villagers' horror, they see the army of the dead, François and Maria Lazare among them, come forward. The villagers scatter or fall on their knees. Jean returns to his mother's empty house and finds his old book of poems, Les Pacifiques, and, laughing contemptuously, tears the pages out one by one. He stops when he gets to his "Ode to the Sun." He goes to the window, looks out at the sun, and recites a new poem in the shaft of light:
My name is Jean Diaz, but I have changed my Muse!
My dulcet name of yesterday has become 'J'accuse!'
And I accuse you, Sun,
Of having given light to this appalling age.
Silently, placidly, without reproach,
Like a hideous face with tongue cut out,
From your heights of blue, sadistically contorted,
You watch indifferently to the very end!
When his recitation is done, Jean falls dead to the floor, and the shaft of light fades to darkness.
This film, released in 1919, is easily the most mesmerizing film from the period that I have seen. The story, the acting, especially the magnificent Séverin-Mars, the often experimental cinematography by Gance's pioneering cohort Léonce-Henry Burel, and the editing, all contribute to an overpowering effect. It was a great success in France. But when Gance took his film to America, and even got the enthusiastic assistance of D. W. Griffith, the film wasn't shown intact to American audiences. The U.S. quite simply didn't suffer as France had suffered from four long years of war. To Americans, the war was a brief boondoggle. The Irving Berlin song "Over There" summed it up beautifully and glibly. The war lasted only a little more than one year for the Yanks, and they returned home to victory parades and patriotic celebrations. A happy ending was tacked onto Gance's film, and it still failed to impress audiences. It was unclear to Americans just what - or whom - Gance was accusing.
J'Accuse is a silent, black-and-white film that speaks directly to us across the century since it was made. Peter Jackson is making a splash with his colorized and sonorized reconstituted documentary film from World War One, claiming that his efforts somehow bring the soldiers in the old films "closer" to us. But what happens then? The actions of those dead men, and the era they lived in, is just as distant from us as ever. They don't approach us, as Gance's phantom army does, begging from us an answer, an explanation for their sacrifice. We can no longer comprehend them or their sacrifice. All we can do, really, is what Philip Larkin did in his poem "MCMXIV" - comment on how appallingly, and magnificently, innocent they were:
Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.
It may require an act of imagination that some of us aren't up to to make contact with the generation of a century ago. It isn't because of technological advances that audiences can't fully appreciate films like J'Accuse any more. It's because filmmakers have become incredibly lazy, and audiences are no longer capable of following a narrative that is the least bit unconventional. On this 100th anniversary of the Armistice, Gance's film is a more than fitting memorial to the age, and to the fallen of the "war to end all wars".
Voting used to be simple, like renewing your driver's license. You heard that an election was looming, maybe you saw the candidates on TV and you got some brochures in the mail. But you registered as a Republican or a Democrat, you stand or you lean on the Right or on the Left, depending on who you are, or where you live, or how much money you make. It was your duty as a citizen, and it was no big deal.
That was then. Apathy has been a problem among American voters for generations. The feeling that so many Americans have had that voting won't change anything, that it makes no difference in their lives which party controls the branches of government, has been pervasive. Some people (like me) didn't vote for most of their lives. And they (unlike me) didn't vote in the 2016 presidential election.
Europeans have always voted in much higher numbers than Americans. They vote more because, if they don't, the outcome could change their lives. If the conservatives don't vote, the communist party might win control of the government. If the liberals don't vote, the extreme right might win. Europeans have a much broader choice in their elections, among three or four or five extremely different parties, with divergent agendas. When communist-party-led labor strikes, and student demonstrations threatened to paralyze the French economy in 1968, sitting president Charles de Gaulle went on national television and, in a magnificently calculated move, offered to resign if it was what the people of France wanted. The following day, the majority of Frenchmen who had been silent throughout the demonstrations, took to the streets of Paris in hundreds of thousands, chanting, "De Gaulle oui! Communisme non!" The strikes ended in a demoralizing defeat for the French Left.
In America, people are telling us that a record number of formerly apathetic voters will turn out in the morning and cast their votes. Since I'm currently living abroad, I submitted my Absentee vote weeks ago. I voted in 2016. Maybe, if I had been living in the States all this time, I would've continued in my apathetic ways and stayed home on election day. Maybe it's because living abroad has made me understand that my right to vote is a responsibility, and that, thousands of miles apart from the country I love so dearly and spent twelve years of my life defending, casting my vote is a way I can take part, raise my hand high - high enough for them to see it - and be counted, and remind my fellow Americans (and myself) that I'm alive and that I can be counted on to contribute.
But there is, of course, a much broader issue at work among American voters, something deeper than apathy. The events that are assailing America, and the rest of the "developed" world, are, for the average citizen, overwhelming. Faced with this, there is a tendency, especially among progressives, to become passive. Today, on the occasion of the mid-term election, what George Orwell wrote on the subject of democracy bears repeating. "There is always the temptation to say: 'One side is as bad as the other, I am neutral.' In practice, however, one cannot be neutral, and there is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. . . . We feel this dilemma to be a painful one, because we see the need of engaging in politics while also seeing what a dirty, degrading business it is. And most of us still have a lingering belief that every choice, even every political choice, is between good and evil, and that if a thing is necessary it is also right. We should, I think, get rid of this belief, which belongs to the nursery. In politics one can never do more than decide which of two evils is the less, and there are some situations from which one can only escape by acting like a devil or a lunatic. . . If you have to take part in such things - and I think you do have to, unless you are armoured by old age or stupidity or hypocrisy - then you also have to keep part of yourself inviolate."
Think of all the voters in 2016 who acted like devils or lunatics by voting for Trump because they could not bring themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton. What must they be thinking right now? American politics has for a long time been about pain. Liberals suffered under 8 years of George W. Bush, then conservatives suffered for 8 years under Obama. A friend told me once that those 8 years of Obama was "hell" and that now it was my turn to suffer. But we suffered for more than a year leading up to the election, as Trump spewed his stupidities all over us day after day. I stated on this blog when Trump was given the Republican nomination, that the party of Abraham Lincoln had just nominated a man who would bring back slavery if he could. Two years ago just prior to election day, pundits were speculating that, with Hillary assured of victory (how could she not?) it would take 50 years for the Republican Party to recover. Right after the election, they were saying the same thing about the Democrats. But I think they got it right the first time. There may be no Republican Party after 2020.
We shall see.
"Without preferences a critic would be a monster."
- Vernon Young(1)
As taste deteriorates, lists proliferate. The BBC, evidently always looking for ways to kill time, has compiled yet another "Top 100" list. Not, this time, of the 100 Greatest Orchestra Conductors from Birkina Faso. Nor of the 100 Greatest Opera Tenors who prefer Pepsi to Coke. (Maybe I shouldn't give them ideas.) This time, it's THE 100 GREATEST FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FILMS. Here's what they came up with, in their proper order (titles in bold are my own favorites):
1. Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)
2. Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio de Sica, 1948)
3. Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1956)
4. Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
5. The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)
6. Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
7. 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, 1963)
8. The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959)
9. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)
10. La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960)
11. Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1959)
12. Farewell My Concubine (Chen Kaige, 1993)
13. M (Fritz Lang, 1931)
14. Jeanne Dielman ... (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
15. Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955)
16. Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)
17. Aguirre, Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)
18. A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1989)
19. The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
20. The Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975)
21. A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, 2011)
22. Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006)
23. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodore Dreyer, 1928
24. Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)
25. Yi Yi (Edward Yang, 2000)
26. Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988)
27. The Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice, 1973)
28. Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1982)
29. Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2003)
30. The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)
31. The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006)
32. All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999)
33. Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)
34. Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1987)
35. The Leopard (Luchino Visconti, 1963)
36. La Grande Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937)
37. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
38. A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, 1991)
39. Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990)
40. Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966)
41. To Live (Zhang Yimou, 1994)
42. City of God (Fernando Meirelles & Kátia Lund, 2002)
43. Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)
44. Cleo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962)
45. L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)
46. Children of Paradise (Marcel Carné, 1945)
47. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, 2007)
48. Viridiana (Luis Buñuel, 1961)
49. Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
50. L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934)
51. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964)
52. Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)
53. Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)
54. Eat Drink Man Woman (Ang Lee, 1994)
55. Jules and Jim (François Truffaut, 1962)
56. Chungking Express (Wong Kar-wai, 1994)
57. Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)
58. The Earrings of Madame de ... (Max Ophuls, 1953)
59. Come and See (Elem Klimov, 1985)
60. Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)
61. Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954)
62. Touki Bouki (Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1973)
63. Spring in a Small Town (Fei Mu, 1948)
64. Three Colors: Blue (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1993)
65. Ordet (Carl Theodore Dreyer, 1955)
66. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1973)
67. The Externinating Angel (Luis Buñuel, 1962)
68. Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)
69. Amour (Michael Haneke, 2012)
70. L'Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962)
71. Happy Together (Wong Kar-Wai, 1997)
72. Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa, 1952)
73. Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
74. Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
75. Belle de Jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967)
76. Y tu Mamá También (Alfonso Cuaron, 2001)
77. The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)
78. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000)
79. Ran (Akira Kurosawa, 1985)
80. The Young and the Damned (Luis Buñuel, 1950)
81. Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette, 1974)
82. Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001)
83. La Strada (Federico Fellini, 1954)
84. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Buñuel, 1972)
85. Umberto D (Vittorio De Sica, 1952)
86. La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962)
87. The Nights of Cabiria (Federico Fellini, 1957)
88. The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1939)
89. Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)
90. Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959)
91. Rififi (Jules Dassin, 1955)
92. Scenes from a Marriage (Ingmar Bergman, 1973)
93. Raise the Red Lantern (Zhang Yimou, 1991)
94. Where Is the Friend's Home? (Abbas Kiarostami, 1987)
95. Floating Clouds (Mikio Naruse, 1955)
96. Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985)
97. Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, 1997)
98. In the Heat of the Sun (Jiang Wen, 1994)
99. Ashes and Diamonds (Andrzej Wajda, 1958)
100. Landscape in the Mist (Theo Angelopoulos, 1988)
Though this list isn't as bad as some others (only because it's about foreign language films), it won't satisfy anyone. If you asked 200 literary critics to name the Top 100 Foreign Language Novels, you would probably reach a much better consensus. Literature doesn't attract fans in anything like the numbers film does. There is simply no other way to account for Claire Denis's Beau Travail outranking L'Avventura, or Amélie sitting there stupidly three jumps ahead of Umberto D.
I haven't seen 28 of the films on the list. But that's preferable to simply forgetting magnificent films like Le Jour se Leve, Open City, Smiles of a Summer Night, Lacombe Lucien, The Sorrow and the Pity, and the great filmmakers Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Ermanno Olmi, Mario Monicelli, Masaki Kobayashi, and Jan Troell. These lists are good for critical parlor games: what they reveal is sometimes counterproductive to their intentions. As someone has already pointed out, there are more films on the list from directors named Jean than from women. The statistics have changed dramatically in the past few decades, but exactly what percentage of filmmakers worldwide are women? Far from anything like parity, my guess. It has been forty years since Lina Wertmüller burst onto the world film scene, and a backlash (led, amazingly, by Feminist critics) has brought her down several pegs, but I still regard her as the greatest woman filmmaker. Just thinking about her makes me want to watch Love and Anarchy again, the story of a hapless, pimple-faced anarchist hiding out in a Roman brothel, waiting for an opportunity - that never materializes - to assassinate Mussolini.
How long does it take - should it take - for a new film to enter a canon? In the 1950s and '60s, it took only three years. I wrote about this in 2012, when the latest Sight and Sound Top Ten Critics' Poll was published: "The sense of permanence has long since, I think, gone out of discussions about films - especially Great Films, which the polls have inadvertently, decade after decade, demonstrated. Simply examine the newest film in each of the polls. In 1952, Bicycle Thieves was number one (it now ranks thirty-third) and was just three years old. In 1962, L'avventura was also just three years old. In 1972, Persona was the newest film in the poll, but it was made six years before. This sense that the art of film was a contemporary, ongoing phenomenon quickly began to fade. In 1982, 8 1/2 was the most recent film in the poll, made nineteen years before. In 1992, 2001: A Space Odyssey made its first appearance in the poll, thanks to its restoration and subsequent rediscovery. But it was a twenty-four year old film by then. By 2002, film's slide into the past was to The Godfather, a thirty year old film. In the latest poll, 2001 is again the newest film, except it has got twenty years older since 1992. So the latest film judged great enough to be in the top ten was made forty-four years ago."(2) (Written six years ago.)
So these attempts to create a canon, while filmmakers were engaged in the process of discovering a unified aesthetic for the medium, and while critics were struggling to account for their struggles, are stymied because the works that were central to our understanding of what constitutes film art kept shifting positions. The only answer to the question, What makes a film a work of art? has got to be, When it is made by an artist.
I can always tell an auteurist (but I can't tell him much). They are big on bestowing auteurship on the unlikeliest people (I get the feeling that eventually everyone who ever made a film will be an auteur), but they are terrible at naming what films made by each and every auteur are better than others. The list gives them away in several places. 4 Andrei Tarkovsky films, each one progressively worse than Ivan's Childhood (1961, which is at least unpretentious). I am not fond of Fassbinder, but surely Berlin Alexanderplatz , though a long way from the Döblin novel, is his best? I like Buñuel very much, but surely The Exterminating Angel, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and Belle de Jour are poor examples of his surrealist art? I would replace them with L'Age d'Or (1930), Simon of the Desert (1965) and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). Krzysztof Kieślowski is a bit overrated, but surely Three Colors: Blue is the worst part of the trilogy. Why not Dekalog (1989-90)? Bresson has only one film on the list, but it is neither Diary of a Country Priest (1950) nor A Man Escaped (1956), better examples of his austere style by far than Au hasard Balthazar. Godard is represented by three films, #s 11, 60, and 74. Breathless was his breakthrough, but Band of Outsiders (1964) and A Married Woman (1964) are immeasurably preferable to Contempt and Pierrot le fou. Making room for 4 Fellini films, then leaving out I Vitelloni (1953)? 5 Bergman films, including his muddled Fanny and Alexander, but ignoring Smiles of a Summer Night (1955 - easily one of the half-dozen most perfect films ever made), the early masterpiece Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), and the best of his chamber films, Winter Light (1962)? I realize that Rossellini's boat has sailed (so has Mizoguchi's), but Open City (1945) remains historically important. Shoah is ranked 96th. According to what aesthetic criteria? I don't mean to suggest that Claude Lanzmann's epochal film is not artfully made (it is deceptively, hypnotically fascinating), but however formidable its artistic merits are, Shoah stands alone and shouldn't have to jockey for position among the likes of Rififi and Amélie.
Further Objections. If you're going to limit Alain Resnais to one film, and you've included Chris Marker's short film La Jetée, why not let Resnais's sole film be Night and Fog (1955), which not only has great artistic merit, but historical relevance as well.
According to the BBC's list, the best decades for film were the 1950s (21 films) and the '60s (19 films). The worst decades were the 1920s and '40s (each with only 4 films).
What is most revealing in the latest lists is the critics' apparent inability to distinguish between what they like and what is good. How can one tell the difference? I like hotdogs, but I know what they're made of. No one is claiming that hotdogs are good food. So why are some critics so enamored of hotdogs like In the Mood for Love or The Spirit of the Beehive or All About My Mother?
But all these lists, which are increasing in number and absurdity, are a symptom of a serious problem among educated people. You can see it in all of the television talent competitions, each more irritating than the next, and even with the cooking competitions and the bake-offs. Self expression, which comes in a myriad of forms, can't be compared or reduced to a competitive sporting event. Some people won't read a book unless they see it listed as a Best Seller. And others want everything to be classified before they can bring themselves to read it or listen to it or watch it. They want to know beforehand if it's worthy of their attention, supposedly because they think that they have so little time to waste. Before they will consent to consuming it, they need it to be pre-digested. The very last thing they want is to be left out of a conversation, but the cultivation of taste that is exclusively their own, without the reinforcement of a support group, is inconceivable. The notion that they could be alone in their preference for a particular book or film or television program terrifies them. What good is personal taste if it isn't shared by others?
(1) Vernon Young, "Somewhat Less Than a World," The Hudson Review, Spring 1967.
(2) see "Poll Position," Widower's Tango, August 9, 2012.
